Zizians

The Zizians

The name Zizian comes from a woman who goes by Ziz, who for all practical matters, started a cult based on an extreme and paranoid philosophy about Artificial Intelligence. The group that formed around Ziz were bright, well educated programmers, most of whom were trans and vegan. As of this writing, this cult has a eight person body count and six of them are in custody. One of them is in hiding, which, good call girl. The Zizians floated around the Bay Area (literally, in the Berkeley Marina), in San Francisco, Sonoma, and Vallejo.

In 2016, Ziz moved from Alaska to San Francisco. She was interested in a movement called Rationalism. BRIEFLY, Rationalists are concerned with living their lives to pursue good as efficiently and effectively as possible; they want to hack their way to acting with pure rationality, and they’re very much into how their actions will affect the future. An outgrowth of this is an obsession with the coming Singularity – the point at which AI becomes sentient and enters God mode.

Ziz joined some local rationalist groups – the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) and the Machine Intelligence Research Group (MIRI), but she became disillusioned with them. They weren’t going far enough. She became obsessed with an adjacent concept called Roko’s Basilisk, which posits that when the Singularity arrives – AI become sentient and acquires Godlike powers – it will look back and see that people didn’t support it, and then like any vengeful God in the human pantheon, it will punish them. This God will be so pissed, the theory goes, that it will punish even those who didn’t try hard enough for it by working for its existence and fighting detractors. This is clearly insane, but if you are deep in thought experiment forums and also doing a lot of ketamine, you might buy into it, which is what happened with Ziz.

Ziz attracted other young Rationalists, and formed a little group that lived together – where else – on a decommissioned Navy Tugboat off the coast of Half Moon Bay. NOW. If you’re from the Bay Area, you definitely have a weird boat person story. We have little marinas all over the place, often filled with decrepit boats that are rotting in situ in some slip purchased for $80 in the 70’s. MY crazy boat person story comes from my sister, who was bebopping around the harbor near the airport with her friends – she must have been 20 – talked her way onto an aging restaurant boat that had been turned into a house boat and was probably occupied by a serial killer. We laugh about this now, but like a lot of dumb shit we did when we were kids, I’m glad she’s still alive!

This Zizian tug was a rotting piece of shit named Caleb that constantly leaked diesel fuel into the water. It broke down frequently, leaving them stranded off the harbor for long periods of time. Put diesel fumes, isolation, and drugs in the mix with this basilisk and you can see how their fantasies got weirder and more paranoid. It was here on this boat that Ziz took things up a notch – deciding to build a “cabal” and start breaking people’s minds in service of the AI God.

An Army of Sociopaths

Ziz wanted to create an army of “sociopaths” to advance her cause, and she did this via a process she called “jailbreaking.” This is classic cult leader stuff, you guys. Cultists use sleep deprivation, drugs, and abuse to break the will of followers. Ziz’s process was basically sleep deprivation, though she developed some convoluted theory about the hemispheres of the brain. She kept these people up until they lost their minds, and at least two of her followers committed suicide after this jailbreaking treatment.

By 2019, the Zizians were back on land and getting more agitated about the Rationalist groups they had split from. When CFAR held a meeting in Sonoma County, the Zizians crashed it. They dressed in Guy Fawkes masks and blocked the entrance and exit with their trucks. They were only handing out flyers, but they scared the shit out of everyone and the SWAT team was called. The members were arrested.

In 2021, Ziz faked her own death. The remaining members moved to Vallejo, where they moved onto the property of Carl Lind. Carl was an 80 year old man who basically owned a scrap lot on the outskirts of town. From the photos, it’s a run down lot full of trailers, car parts, old machines, and trash. Lind was by most accounts a nice guy who was letting people park their trailers on his land for cheap. He seemed to have a good relationship with the Zizians, at least until they stopped paying rent.

When Lind tried to evict them, they tried to kill him. Literally! Three Zizians stabbed Lind over 50 times and then PUT A KATANA THROUGH HIS CHEST. Lind, who was strapped, shot and killed one member and wounded another. Miraculously, he survived. The remaining members were arrested.

At this point, an East Coast chapter of the Zizians opened up. Because why not! In 2022, two followers – Alice and Jaime – moved to Vermont. In 2023, Jaime’s parents were brutally murdered in their Pennsylvania home. Police suspected Jaime of the murder; she owned the same caliber handgun as the one used in the shooting, someone can be heard yelling “Mom!” on the Ring footage shortly before the attack, and Jaime stood to inherit from them. Jaime and another Zizian were arrested, but bonded out and disappeared.

In 2025, two different Zizians were pulled over near the Vermont border. Locals reported them to the police because they were wearing tactical armor and were armed to the teeth. When a border patrol agent pulled them over, they opened fire and a gun battle ensued. The DHS agent died, along with one of the members. Around the same time, a Zizian in Vallejo stalked and killed Carl Lind, presumably to prevent him from testifying against them for the attempted murder.

Ziz and the members who fled bond after the murders in Pennsylvania were FINALLY caught in February of 2025. They were armed and wearing Rambo style gun belts, because this scene is exactly as weird as you’re imagining it. I wonder what if the coming AI God is #2A. I’m not sure if everyone is being held on the East Coast still, but on behalf of California, we are sorry!

Presumably, the arrests spell the end of the cult.

California Dreaming

The Zizians didn’t come out of nowhere, though. California, and the Bay Area, are a big part of the story. We have a long history of death cults, and while they seem to be slowing down with the crime rate in general, the Zizians probably aren’t the last one.

There’s a reason your Trump uncle in Wisconsin calls California “the land of fruits and nuts,” and it’s not because of blue haired woke baristas. It’s because in the 60’s, hippies arrived here en masse and when they had burned themselves out, they became methed-out cult leaders and Jesus Freaks. California absorbed the nation’s disaffected, struggling youth and let them overstay the party. When the lights came back on, we had a horrifying collection of dangerous cults – the Manson Family, the People’s Temple, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and Synanon.

Some of the factors that made San Francisco a cradle for those cults are still present today. The Bay Area likes to think of itself as a social laboratory. San Francisco was long a refuge for people who needed to flee constricting conservative homes – gays, punks, radicals. We attract a lot of weirdos, and that’s mostly been ok. Free thinking is seen as a positive here. As the city has gotten richer and more conservative, even the reactionaries use this language to describe themselves, see, e.g., Bari Weiss’ “Free Press” school of “heterodox” thinking. Barf!

San Francisco is famous for its gender bending, come as you are ethos, but you’ll meet a lot of right-wing adjacent philosopher types here too. Techno utopians, sea steading libertarians, effective altruists, techno-fascists. It seems like the pro-natalists and hipster evangelicals are getting a foothold here, in addition to the weird crypto-Catholics like Thiel and Vance. Edgelord extraordinaire Curtis Yarvin lives here (and sends his kids to a precious, progressive school with the rest of technorati). Rene Girard, Thiel’s philosopher hero, was a professor at Stanford. These people essentially believe that the rest of us are too stupid to self govern, and we need a Tech CEO Daddy King to take the helm. It’s not exactly rationalism, but it shares the idea that technology is here to take over from the dumb ass humans. It’s dark.

From my point of view, the dark strain of thought that followed the bust of the hippie movement is still present. As tech gets more and more powerful, it also seems to get reductive. We have one boom and bust cycle after another, and the belle du jour in town is AI. You know how annoying it is to see an AI prompt on every fucking piece of software you own – no meta! I don’t need AI to write DM’s for me! – now imagine what it feels like to see the ads everywhere you go. It makes the wealth gaps even more pronounced. Every bus in town is plastered over with some AI CRM nonsense that only a third of the population understands. It’s a jarring reminder that it’s not for you.

The more I read about these dark, tech-adjacent philosophies, the more it starts to remind me of the actual occult. I love this quote from Evan Ratliff in their comprehensive Wired piece about the Zizians:

The more time I spent following the group that some called the Zizians, the more their story started seeming itself like some kind of basilisk. Just by virtue of having examined its events, you were trapped in its world, subject to its terms. Inside that world it felt like some future evil was rapidly approaching, ominous events waiting just beyond the horizon. But speaking of them could usher them faster, closer. I was certain the story as I understood it was incomplete but unsure where to look to complete it. Or if I did, whether I could tell it without attracting the basilisk’s gaze myself.

Spend enough time thinking about any of this and it gets spooky. You’re looking into the abyss. You’re looking at the negative image of the cheerful, goofy AI ads on the bus or the relentless optimism of the tech press on this technology. This is getting into dime store philosopher territory here and I promise I’m not trying to start my own cult, but it seems like if we don’t pay attention to these things, it’s going to spill out in increasingly dark and destructive ways.